Dreamscapes of modernity : sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power

__Dreamscapes of Modernity__ offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies. This volume introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to help explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. Sociotechnological imaginaries add a new dimension to work in anthropology and political theory dealing with collective beliefs about social order. Work in these fields has not been properly attentive to the role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. At the same time, sociotechnical imaginaries supplement more micro-focused work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), showing how developments in science and technology take place within wider cultural understandings of how societies ought to live, and how such developments are bound up with existing structures of normativity and power. Through a mix of case studies, together with a theoretical introduction and a synoptic conclusion, the volume demonstrates how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the politics of science and technology. The case studies illustrate how different imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits and risks of social life are co-produced along with the construction of science and technology—at scales ranging from institutional to national to global. Chapters ask how the work of collective imagining responds to and accommodates some of the salient political challenges of modernity: democracy, the expert/lay divide, novel understandings of life, public ethics, and institutional accountability. The book thereby opens up a fertile space for the comparative analysis of science, technology, politics, and political cultures, as well as for methodological cross-fertilization among diverse STS-related disciplines Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies??including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more??to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors' wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.-- Résumé de l'éditeur Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies, including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more, to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors' wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.-- Provided by Publisher